i put in an order for 3 frags from upscales.com yesterday, and since this hobby demands pay-out-your-ass overnight shipping on everything, they came in the mail this morning. so i took a nice long lunch to come home and unpack and acclimate them. and so far, so good. i got a birdnest, staghorn, and samoensis. and wow is the staghorn blue. (and i dont even have actinics) hopefully they all make it; these are my first acropora corals. in my old tank i just kept montipora and a boring brown anacropora frag lovingly referred to by my girlfriend as “the penis coral”.

i dont have any underwater putty to mount them yet, and since i hate messing with the super glue gel, i’ll just let them chill in my frag rack until then.

and i also found out that my sailfin is a complete camera hog. the damn thing acts more like a dog than a fish, which is cool and all, but not very useful when i’m trying to take pictures, as you can see:

i’m currently trying to figure out whats causing my microbubble issue; it is damn annoying. i’ve narrowed it down to my return pump, so i’m thinking about replacing the pump with an eheim 1250 and the tubing with the solid black kind. i’ll probably do that next month or something.

I finally made a trip back home, and while i was there i picked up my long lost frogspawn. it was the centerpiece of my last tank, and i just couldn’t part with it when it came time to sell all my livestock before the move. it made the trip just fine and within an hour was fluffing out pretty well.

i also had a royal gramma and false perc clownfish waiting for me, but literally two days before i headed home, the gramma decided to find out what the carpet felt like. he didn’t even leave a note! i figured a $15 clownfish wasn’t worth a 4 hour trip so i let my oh-so-nice fish sitter keep it. (he just lost a clownfish of his own)

to avoid a long story, lets just say i had a rental car for the day. and of course my destinations for driving around town were some local fish stores. i grabbed a sailfin tang and a lawnmower blenny while i was out. don’t worry, it wasn’t a compulsive buy just because my tank is finally ready. i’ve been eye-ing sailfins for awhile, and this guy just seemed to have the right personality. hopefully he’s a swimmer and not a hider. the LMB, well everybody needs one of those, right? :] i’m looking to have a large fish-load, so i feel a little preventative maintenance goes a long way

as i saw the rise and fall of the diatom part of my cycle, i ordered a cleanup crew for the ensuing green algae outbreak. from eTropicals.com i ordered 20 astrea, 20 cerith, and 20 nassarius snails. i decided i’m not going to use crabs or turbo snails this time around. i never really saw the crabs working in my last tank and those turbo snails are just bulls in a china shop. only 40 of the snails arrived (cerith was backordered), but they got right to work. i’ll probably end up getting some more, but this should do for now.

also in the mail came my newest gadget. it’s a reef fanatic ph/temp monitor. pretty neat stuff. since i’m still cycling i’m not too worried about keeping my pH at 8.2 but eventually this thing should help out alot

not a good start, but i’m not letting it get me down.

along with the batch of LR i purchased from a member of MARSH, i also got a couple of balls of chaeto for my fuge. turns out his stash was infested with flatworms. after tossing the cheato, i still had quite a few of the guys in my fuge, so i decided to hit them while i was still cycling.

i got a bottle of salifert flatworm exit and went to town. it may have been a little demented, but my girlfriend and i had fun watching those little guys keel over when it started to take effect. i’d say it killed about 90% of the flatworms, so i dosed it again. i still have a few that refuse to kick the bucket, so i’m probably going to end up using the rest of the bottle to make sure they’re all dead. since i dont have any livestock yet i’m not worried about the aftermath.

you could say it was lucky timing though, since i found out i had flatworms right when i was expecting my new media reactor in the mail! so i was ready with carbon once they started releasing all their toxins into the water (like it mattered, but anyway)

so here starts my new reef journal. hope everybody has fun looking at all the pictures. :]

to get everybody up to speed: my first attempt at reef-keeping was back in college from may 2004 to april 2006 (most of 2004 was spent researching and saving money, so i really didn’t get started until december 2004). i kept mostly softies, but i did have a nice frogspawn and a couple of sps pieces. since i was in college, the entire operation was low-cost from the get-go. most of my corals were give-away frags from LARC meetings and the only real piece of equipment i had was a protein skimmer. but i made it work. even with weak PC lighting, my corals thrived. in that year and a half, i learned alot about the hobby but never had an opportunity to go to the next level. that is, until i was offered a job in houston after graduation. long story short, it inspired me to restart my tank.

and this blog will be a journal of that restart. i’ve kept all the equipment from before, except my lights, and will be using my new “grown-up money” :] to use the lessons i learned as a budget reefer and make this a success. i plan to focus on SPS corals with some LPS thrown in for good measure (80/20 split). for fish, i’m looking into getting a school(5) of bartlett’s anthias and a purple tang, among others.

here are my current specs:

• Equipment
• 75g Perfecto Tank (48″x18″x20″) w/ custom stand and canopy
• 29g tall sump (30″x12″x19″)
• ASM G2 protein skimmer
• 2 x 250w 14k+ Phoenix MH bulbs
• 2 x Reef Optix III Plus pendants
• Blue Wave VII HQI ballast
• 2 x MaxiJet 1200 powerhead
• Typhooon III RO/DI unit from AirWaterIce.com
• Dual switch auto-topoff system w/ RO/DI solenoid from AutoTopOff.com
• Livestock
• 120lbs of Carib-sea Oolite sand
• 90lbs LR